The solicitor David Hutchins (website) is giving a one-day seminar on English law for legal translators on Monday 14 March in London. He’s spoken to translators before and been well received, I gather. Here is the blurb:

One-Day Course / Workshop: LONDON: MONDAY 14th MARCH, 2011: English Law for Legal Translators
Key Terminology and Concepts in Common Law: Contract & Civil Liability

The venue will be St Giles Hotel, Bedford Avenue, London WC1B 3GH, UK, Tel.: +(44)0 20 7300 3000. Bedford Avenue is off Tottenham Court Road close to Tottenham Court Road tube station.

The course will start at 9.0 am and finish at about 5.30pm.

This will be the same very successful course I presented in Stockholm and Nice in December and for the North-West Translators’ Network, NWTN in Manchester on the 22nd January.

Stockholm: 6th Dec. 2010 For the Sveriges Facköversättarförening, SFÖ (Swedish Assoc. of Professional Translators)

Nice: 17th Dec. 2010 For 12 members of the Compagnie Experts Traducteurs Interprètes Judiciaires,
C E T I J

Visit my website (www.lexacomlegal.com) and read the excellent feedback quotations. (“Client Testimonial”).

My course / workshop is interactive and covers the interpretation of the terms and wording of contracts, contract law, civil liability in contract and in tort, damages, evidence, and general Common Law terminology.

If you, your Association, or any colleagues might be interested email me for the detailed Course Programme and with any questions, without any commitment or obligation AND / OR let me know if you would like to make a booking.

Course materials (notes, law reports and legal documents) will be distributed by email to all participants one week in advance. The course and all documents will be in English. The course is aimed at translators, of whatever nationality, who translate legal documents FROM or INTO English.

The price will be £150 per person, including a two-course buffet lunch and VAT, and there will be a maximum of 18 participants.

DAVID HUTCHINS (SOLICITOR)
31 Rathbone Place
London W1T 1JH
00 44 7885 722 529
www.lexacomlegal.com

The most stupid play I encountered at school was the play some of us acted in in the sixth form. We had an English teacher who had been assistant stage manager at the local theatre for a couple of years, and she was very into drama and very popular, but I didn’t share her taste in literature, and at the same time for social reasons felt obliged to take the dreadful role of the chaplain in Christopher Fry’s The Lady’s Not for Burning. The title has since become famous because Margaret Thatcher (I’m looking forward to seeing Meryl Streep in that role) turned it into ‘The lady’s not for turning’. It was sort of wishy-washy 1950s poetry. I just discovered that Christopher Fry died recently at the age of 98. I still can’t forgive him though. I was embarrassed to appear in it.

This is going back a long way. I think Horace’s poems were quite good.
Digressing a bit: we had four books each for French and German A Level, and the French choice (it depended on what board you did A Levels for) was greatly superior: Beaumarchais, Mariage de Figaro; Gide, La Porte Étroite; Mauriac, Le noeud de vipères; hm, can’t remember what else. German: Goethe, Götz von Berlichingen; Schiller, Wilhelm Tell (those are the least interesting Goethe and Schiller plays I can think of); Bergengruen, can’t remember which Novelle – maybe it was Die Feuerprobe; can’t remember the fourth. I know the first book I ever succeeded in reading in German, after O Levels, when we were allowed to choose a book from a mixed box, was Ricarda Huch, Der letzte Sommer, which was ideal for a first read in what seemed a difficult language at the time.

Breon Mitchell has won the Schlegel–Tieck Prize for translation from German for his new version of The Tin Drum by Günter Grass. The TLS:

Günter Grass’s first novel, Die Blechtrommel, was published in 1959 and Ralph Manheim’s translation of it in 1962. In 2005, Grass invited his new translators on a tour of the city of Gdańsk, where (as Danzig) the novel is set. According to Breon Mitchell, who wins this year’s Schlegel-Tieck for his new version of The Tin Drum (582pp. Harvill Secker. £20. 978 1 846 55317 2), “on that summer day in Gdańsk, translators both old and new had gathered once again with a special goal in mind – new translations to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Die Blechtrommel”. While paying proper homage to Manheim, Mitchell points out that “each sentence in the new Tin Drum now faithfully replicates the length of the sentence in Grass’s original text, and no sentences are broken up or deliberately shortened”. Eschewing the smoothing out which some translators are prone to (perhaps for fear of appearing too literal), Mitchell singles out an example of his method: “He was also the Formella brothers’ boss, and was pleased, as we were pleased, to meet us, to meet him” (Manheim: “He was also the Formella brothers’ boss and was glad to make our acquaintance, just as we were glad to make his”). As Mitchell says, he has “sometimes placed the sound and rhythm of a sentence above normal syntax and grammar”, while honouring a “syntactic complexity that stretches language”. The results will certainly have met with Grass’s approval. Mitchell also provides an extensive glossary.

So what was the original German?

Auch war er der Chef der Formella-Brüder und freute sich, wie wir uns freuten, uns kennengelernt, ihn kennengelernt zu haben.

Fair enough. I found that on scribd and wonder how long it will be up there.

A recent entry in Susan Bernofsky’s weblog Translationista pointed out that Oliver Pötzsch’s Die Henkerstochter, translated into English as The Hangman’s Daughter, is doing very well. It hadn’t even made my radar, but apparently it’s ‘popular literature’! That reminds me of Frank Schätzing’s Der Schwarm, which did really well as The Swarm (and I even read two-thirds of it in German, but I felt it departing from sense after that).

Bernofsky also mentions the great success of Stieg Larsson books, and the fact that to look at amazon’s website, you wouldn’t think they were translations, because the translator isn’t named. From that she mentions the translator, Reg Keeland, an American, who has a weblog on translation. Reg Keeland is not his real name (he’s Steven Murray), but he was so disgusted at the UK-ification of his translation, done with no time for him to react before publication, that he changed his name for the books:

The printed version of the books was edited in the UK, and the US publisher didn’t do a lot of editing to them, I don’t think. Can’t say exactly because I haven’t read them since I finished translating in 2006. Watch out for: dogsbody, exiguous, gallimaufry, anon, forsooth, and other such British interpolations in my originally American translation! And I sure wouldn’t say “get ahold of” unless I was writing some rural Appalachian story…

This sounds worse than what the Americans did to A.S. Byatt, forsooth!

This is an odd question. It must refer to large and difficult books one expects to be rewarding. I think perhaps Blackstone’s Commentaries, although I’ve read a little bit. Here they are online. But ‘always’? I can’t have wanted to read them much before 1976. But I think memory has drawn a veil over the rest.